Instagram's Boomerang makes photos that move to GIF your life

October 22, 2015

Culture

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Transcript

There's a new way to make gifts of yourself for Facebook.
I'm Bridget Carey, this is your CNET update.
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The amazing supercomputers in our pockets allow us to communicate with anyone around the globe in ways we've never imagined.
Like with taco emojis and one second looping videos.
So, not only did iPhone users get a bunch of new emoji icons in a software update this week, but Instagram has gifted mankind with a new app called Boomerang.
It's on both iOS and Android.
You create these super short videos, they're just one second long without sound, and it loops forward and backward forever, like a GIF.
Why?
Because, clearly we're not satisfied with still photos anymore.
Facebook profile pictures can animate and the Iphone 6s has live photos that move and this excites people because maybe we spend to much sitting still for hours staring at our phones.
Which brings me to knew emojis.
iPhone owners, you'll find a 150 new emoji characters in the iOS 9.1 software updates.
Among the new icons are several foods like a taco and a chili pepper and animals like a unicorn and a lion and.
Some weird smileys like the money mouth face.
And yes, there's even a middle finger.
If you send it to someone who didn't update or someone with an Android or Windows phone, they won't likely be able to see the icons until those operating systems update to support the new Unicode symbols.
And there's one emoji in particular that has an interesting story behind it, the eye inside of a speech bubble is not an official approved Unicode symbol, so did Apple just make it up?
No, in fact it was created by The Ad Council.
The same folks that created Smokey the Bear and McGruff the Crime Dog created this symbol to represent an anti-bullying campaign.
And the group asked Apple to include it with other emojis.
It means, "I am a witness." A witness to bullying.
And the hope is that it will be used to empower people to send it to stand up to online bullying and to support their friends to not listen to the hate.
Those that don't have iOS 9 can also get icons to copy and paste as photos from a separate keyboard app called iAmAWitness.
And there's a pretty big change over at YouTube, the online giant unveiled a new Service that costs $10 a month, so you can watch videos without advertisements.
And with that fee you also can watch some videos that other people cannot.
Popular YouTube stars are going to create videos only subscribers can see.
It's called YouTube Red, and it launches October 28th with a free one month trial.
There are so many paid services these days.
Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify, Apple Music, HBO Now So, YouTube will have to make those new perks pretty exciting for people to want to pay for YouTube, which has been free for ten years.
That's it for this tech news update, and there's more at cnet.com.
From our studios in New York, I'm Bridget Carey.
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